Nurse Shelley Decides
By Arlene Hale, ©1964Cover illustration by Mort Engle
“Are you after a fat paycheck, Nurse?” The contempt in Dr. Adam Victor’s voice stung Shelley—but it was true she was leaving the hospital to nurse a private patient, and Miriam Bleeker was very rich indeed. The handsome young doctor looked on Shelley as a deserter—and what made it worse was that Dr. Victor had declared war on the whole Bleeker family … and anyone who was with them was his enemy!
GRADE: C+
BEST QUOTES:
“I’m direct. That’s my big problem. I say what I think. Do you know how many people go around never really saying what they think or doing what they want, or being their real selves? IT’s sickening. It really is.”
REVIEW:
Dr. Adam Victor is a tall, hungry-looking young man who yells at all the nurses and “seemed to hate all women in general, nurses in particular and Shelley especially.” Naturally, Nurse Shelley Stevens is drawn to this doctor, with whom she does nothing but fight. “She didn’t know why she allowed him to upset her so much, but he invariably did.” Well, we know why, don’t we, readers! Shelley has a boyfriend, artist Paul deWinters, but though she loves hanging out in his apartment, she’s not as emphatically gung-ho about him. He doesn’t have a lot of ambition, “content to drift along in his easy-going way,” and besides, “there was always something just not quite right. Something was not complete.” This setup is a fairly standard VNRN ploy, telegraphing from the first page what’s going to happen on the last. It bores me.
Shelley lives and works in a mill town, and the mill in question is owned by the Bleeker family. The operating conditions at the mills are poor, and many workers end up in the hospital after accidents that could have been avoided. This is why Dr. Victor hates the Bleekers so much. But Shelley is asked as a special favor by Dr. Harris, an old friend who encouraged her to go to nursing school, to take a job specialing Miriam Bleeker, who is recovering from a stroke. So though she knows it is going to get her into hot water at work—and sure enough, it does—she takes the job. While she’s living in the Bleeker mansion, she begins to run into numerous mysteries: Why won’t the unions advocate for the workers but are content to let the lax conditions go unchallenged? Why is Dr. Harris, who is the medical director for the mills, also disinterested in pushing for better safety for the workers? What is Dr. Harris’ relationship with Mrs. Bleeker? Why has Mr. Bleeker abandoned the family?
About halfway through the book, Dr. Vincent and Shelley meet up at the funeral of a much-beloved patient and end up at dinner together—and kissing afterward. “I don’t understand. I thought we hated each other,” says Shelley the simpleton. After kissing her silly, Dr. Victor insists that Shelley quit working for the Bleekers, or “we’ll forget what just happened.” She’s shocked, but has enough spine to give him a piece of her mind and go back to the Bleekers.
Eventually, the crisis you knew was going to happen actually does: There’s a big explosion at the mill, and many people are seriously injured or killed. The shock of the accident also sends Miriam into a second and fatal heart attack. This saves everyone from the responsibility of agency: With Miriam out of the picture, her son Blake finally has the spine to throw his cheating wife and the corrupt union boss out on their ears, and start running a responsible business, vowing to rebuild the mill according to the best safety standards out there! Mr. Bleeker is returned to the mansion from the nursing home where he’d been hiding out, and Shelley is obliged to return to her job at the hospital. So now all it takes is for Dr. Victor to come striding over to her, grip her painfully by the shoulders, and command, “You’re going to marry me, Shelley. Just as soon as it can be arranged.” And that’s that, all but the nauseating final sentence.
The writing isn’t bad, but the plot is trite, and Nurse Shelley’s capitulation is more than a little disappointing, especially after the way she has stood up for herself all through the book. And we’re left with the question: What did Shelley decide? Seems to me the decision was made for her. If you figure it out, let me in on it.
Rangeland Nurse
By Suzanne Roberts, ©1967Trudi Dalton left the bluegrass country of Kentucky on a very special journey. On a sprawling ranch set in the deep purple mountains of the West, a little boy named Ricky was confined to a wheelchair. And the young nurse had come to take care of him Trudi soon discovered that her real problem was not in nursing the boy, rather it was in dealing with his father, widower Matt Frazier. For the handsome rancher’s bitterness and indifference to his son provoked Trudi’s fiery temper. Yet, unwillingly, she found herself falling in love with Matt Frazier. Faced with a terrible crisis that would affect all their lives, Trudi would be forced into a desperate gamble—if she succeeded, they could become a united family—and if she failed she would lose both Ricky and Matt forever…
GRADE: C-
BEST QUOTES:
“Men like girls with tempers, you know.”
“I learned long ago that you can’t sop a woman from doing what she wants to do. Oh—you can tie her up and maybe horse whip her, but if she doesn’t want to stay around, she isn’t going to.”
“I—I’m through making promises about what my talented, noble, sensitive doctor’s hands can do in surgery.”
REVIEW:
Rancher and widower Matt Frazier is not a nice man. He’s rude, bitter, distant, angry, “cold and mixed-up and yes even cruel.” He insists that his ten-year-old son, Ricky, confined to a wheelchair with myasthenia gravis, will be completely cured, though the chances of this are slim—and talks to Ricky “as if nothing else in this world was important, except that he be able to walk again. As if there would be no kind of life for him if he wasn’t made well.”
Naturally, Nurse Trudi Dalton, trucked out to the West to care for Ricky, instantly falls in love with this monster. Even at their first meeting, when he grabs her by the shoulders and shouts at her, “You’ll damned well do what I tell you to!” all she can think of is how “strangely exciting” are his fingers digging into her shoulders, of Matt’s “amazing power and charm.” Charm? Though she thinks that “falling in love with Matt Frazier would be a deadly, heartbreaking business. Might as well fall in love with a cobra,” it’s a short seven more pages before the dope is doing just that. Now, when Matt “barked orders at her, she merely nodded and obeyed.” Several times when he has actually fired her, she goes crawling to him, begging for her job back. It’s positively revolting.
Matt has hired San Francisco surgeon David Fielding to come to the ranch for two weeks to prepare Ricky for removal of his thymus gland, which might improve Ricky’s myasthenia gravis. While he’s in the neighborhood, David takes out Trudi and falls for her, and Trudi finds that “there was a wonderful kind of closeness between them. David was—security.” The surgery, when it finally comes to pass, is complicated by an unspecified problem with Ricky’s breathing that necessitates a tracheotomy, and somehow this means that the thymectomy is a failure, and that Ricky will not improve after the surgery. It also means that Trudi can’t marry David, because now Matt and Ricky will need her back at the ranch. Ricky certainly will, because now his father refuses to see him or speak to him. “My boy might as well be dead as live the kind of life he’s going to be living from now on,” he tells Trudi. “A lifelong cripple leading a dull, useless, futile life!” Thanks, Dad.
So when Matt leaves for a three-week business trip—without saying goodbye to his son, of course—Trudi cooks up a wild plan, to teach Ricky to ride the most dangerous, wild stallion on the ranch, the one who’s constantly kicking down the walls to his stall. It’s “a way to change a lot of things and make them better,” she tells Ricky. I’m not sure I follow the logic, but there it is. And I’m not going to be as patronizing as author Suzanne Roberts is and tell you how this all pans out, because you already know. The ending is as nauseating as such an insipid story deserves, is all I’ll say, and hope that you are persuaded to avoid this brainless novel altogether.
Calling Nurse Linda
By Patti Stone, ©1961GRADE: B+
BEST QUOTES:
“Now, Helen, you aren’t going to go fussy on me. You know I wouldn’t have done a hysterectomy unless it was absolutely necessary. Don’t you worry about a thing. A few little old shots and some pills and you’ll feel younger than ever—prettier too.”
“Ladylike, that was the word for Linda. She would make a good wife for a doctor.”
“Climb into bed with a grateful patient, and you were climbing into bed with trouble.”
“I think she’s got trouble—doctor trouble.”
“She’ll stick around till he teaches her some facts of life she’s never learned in textbooks.”
“Why does a woman choose to be split from stem to stern when she could so easily produce her baby through the regular route? Maybe she wants to be fashionable and keep a virginal vagina on top of everything—no pun intended.”
“Witty women bore me. You’re just supposed to sit there and look decorative.”
“You don’t mean you’re going to turn down an invitation to go to this marvelous pool because of a bunch of crippled children?”
REVIEW:
This is an Ace double novel, meaning if you flip the book over, another complete novel starts on the other side—which is why there is no back cover blurb accompanying this review. This book is backed with Dr. Kilbourne Comes Home, which not only features a male doctor as the star, but has no nurse, no matter what the cover illustration might make you think. So you will not be seeing a review of that story; I might put out a review of a book with a male protagonist if he ends up with a nurse in the end, but if there is no RN in sight, neither will I be.
In the half of this book that does concern us, Nurse Linda Shore is hopelessly in love with gorgeous OB/GYNDr. Shelby Tailor, who is a shameless cad. He strings her along, breaking dates at the last minute when a better offer comes along, and she is hopelessly smitten, the poor dolt. She’s working on the pediatrics ward when she meets Adam Ralston, “an Abe Lincoln in specs,” Linda thinks of him. He’s studying for a master’s degree in education, with a focus on handicapped children. He steps in to comfort a frightened child, and Linda is impressed: “He had been so calm and cool, and—oh—exactly right.” Adam has a son of his own, Teddy, who is “spastic,” which is what they used to call someone with cerebral palsy. He has a farm in the country, where he takes Teddy and a group of handicapped children for a few weeks in the summer, but his dream is to turn this into a year-round rehabilitation center. Where his wife is, he is slow to reveal—they’re divorced, it turns out—but since Linda’s heart is irretrievably sworn to Shelby, it doesn’t really matter, right?
Linda’s sister soon moves to town, and 18-year-old Robin soon proves to be a quite the flirt. And when Shelby, who has been cooling toward Linda, meets Robin, suddenly he’s stopping by more frequently. When Linda finally gets wind of the fact that Shelby has been taking Robin out, he smooths it over by telling her, “You’re becoming more important to me than any woman I know.” And she falls for it, the dope. He keeps seeing Robin, calling her multiple times daily, and she becomes increasingly petulant, demanding that he drop Linda and marry her, but he is quite convinced that, despite his obsession with Robin, he doesn’t want to marry her, so he’s in a bit of a jam there.
His professional life isn’t going much better: He’s taken on wealthy Gilda Dalrymple, daughter of the hospital chief of staff, as a patient. He induces her labor for no medical reason, which is ethically and medically dicey, and messes up the dosing of the oxytocin. Needless to say, Gilda’s labor progresses too fast, her cervix tears, and she will never be able to have another child. Not only that, but her son turns out to have Down syndrome: “He was—dear God—he was an idiot!” Which is apparently worse than if he’d been stillborn, as Gilda lapses into a near coma of depression and grief and refuses to see the baby. Shelby’s career is in tatters, so he proposes to Linda—she’s become good friends with Gilda during Gilda’s long stay in the hospital, and “maybe she could put a good word in for him. Yes, it might be a very good thing for Dr. Shelby Tailor to be engaged to Linda Shore.”
Linda saves the day, of course, by gently encouraging Gilda to care for her son and by taking Gilda and her son out to see Adam and Teddy at the house in the country. Adam helps talk sense into Gilda, diagnosing her with postpartum depression, which her illustrious doctor failed to pick up. For his part, “Teddy, who loved everybody, leaned against Gilda’s knee, and slowly she overcame her revulsion for his braces and jerking movements, and her arms went around him.” Gilda stays at the farm for a week, with Linda there to nurse her, and soon she’s everything a new mother should be.
Now all that we have to do is push Linda into Adam’s arms, and what better to do that than a classic VNRN device, the natural disaster? A tornado blows through, destroying Adam’s farm—and the Black Cat, a seedy nightclub, where Robin and Shelby were, coincidentally, out on a date! Robin winds up in the hospital and, in her panic, blurts the affair to Linda, which finally wakes up our pathetic heroine. She dumps Shelby, who departs for Mississippi, and Gilda and her father are so grateful to her and Adam for their help that they fund the transformation of the destroyed farm into the John Dalrymple rehabilitation center for handicapped children, named after Gilda’s son. Adam offers her a job there as head nurse, and she accepts—thinking of the years she will devote to her career instead of a husband. And if Linda finishes the book with a broken heart instead of an engagement ring, we understand Adam will wait for her.
It’s a sweet ending, one of the better ones I’ve encountered, particularly since it doesn’t brush off her love for Shelby with a flick of the pen the way most VNRN writers do. The writing here is steady and enjoyable, if not the most exciting. Patti Stone’s prior four books (Nina Grant, Pediatric Nurse; Sandra, Surgical Nurse; Judy George, Student Nurse; and Big Town Nurse) have earned either a B+ or a C, and this is definitely good enough to win the former mark.
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| The cover of the second novel in this Ace Double Book |
Luxury Nurse
By Peggy Gaddis, ©1956“You’re sound, Sally, very sound,” Dr. Garry Linton told her. Nurse Sinclair laughed. “Are you talking about a nice big russet apple, or me?” she asked. But she was troubled. He said he loved her, but did he? And now she would be away nursing Lisa Cannon for three long months, Lisa, whose high-strung disposition and self-pity made her as unpleasant to be with as she was lovely to behold. But Sea Island was a magical isle and Sally Sinclair was determined to explore all of the magic of it. It began when she discovered the exquisite miniature village—a Lilliput town—which Allen Blaisdell had built. After that, everything seemed to change, as if Sally had found the key to the secret garden, to Lisa’s recovery, and to her own heart.
GRADE: C-
BEST QUOTES:
“ ‘I have never,’ stated Garry grimly, ‘seen anybody I would so thoroughly enjoy turning over my knee for a session with a slipper in my good right hand. How do you stand her, Sally?’ ”
“Women are the simplest creatures on earth; all they ask is to be loved and considered vastly mysterious, which they aren’t in the smallest degree.”
“If you dare offer me a sedative or a supposedly soothing word, I’ll throw something at you.”
REVIEW:
Sally Sinclair is dating Dr. Garry Linton, but is quite clear about the fact that she is the only nurse at the hospital who isn’t in love with him. He’s told her that he wants to marry her—as usual, in a few years when he has established his practice and can support her—but she gives him a cold shower, right there in the second chapter: “I’m not a bit sure that I’m in love with you,” she says. “I like you enormously; I admire you tremendously; but I’m not sure that’s love.” Well, we’ll just see about that, missy.
She’s caring for 18-year-old Lisa Cannon, “the season’s most successful and most popular debutante,” who is in the hospital for the foreseeable future because, according to Nurse Sinclair’s expert diagnosis, “your nerves cracked up from sheer exhaustion.” Lisa’s ready to leave the hospital, but needs nursing for the three months it will take for her to recover from her crackup. So Sally is nominated to go with her, because she’s so good at dispensing helpful advice such as, “You’ll have to pull yourself together and stop that crying, or I’ll have to get Dr. Linton to give you a sedative.” If disdain doesn’t work, a good nurse can always resort to violence; when Lisa insults her father, “Sally barely managed to restrain an impulse to slap the girl hard.” Needless to say, I’m not impressed with Sally’s haughtiness, disrespect, and rudeness to her patient, but in a Peggy Gaddis novel, these qualities add up to a great nurse, since Sally is slightly better behaved than her extremely spoiled patient.
So off Sally and Lisa go to the Cannon cottage on Sea Island, Georgia—a beautiful, upscale beach resort that I happen to know fairly well and that figures very prominently in the book. If you’re familiar with it also, it’s especially fun to go for dinner and dancing at The Cloister, the historic hotel there, even if that worthless cad Thorne Cooper does show up and make eyes at Lisa across the ballroom. He’d accepted $50,000 from Mr. Cannon to stay away from Lisa, but now he strides up to the party and drops a check on the dinner table, the principle from the “loan,” plus $10,000 interest. “I made you no loan,” Mr. Cannon explodes in response. “I bribed you to stay away from my daughter.” But that’s admirable too, in Peggy Gaddis’ eyes, just a good father protecting his child from social parasites.
Now Thorne is dropping by the house, making no bones about the fact that he’s only interested in Lisa’s money. Garry also stops by now and then, but Sally continues to remind him that she doesn’t love him. Then one day while wandering the beach in the morning—Lisa sleeps until noon, of course—Sally comes across a tiny town of miniature houses and buildings and even twee rosebushes that have to be watered with an eyedropper. It’s a business created by local resident and old crush of Lisa’s, Allen Blaisdell (though it’s not clear how they knew each other; he’s ten years older than she is), who has hired veterans disfigured by the war to build these creations. Sally is utterly captivated and speaks so warmly of Allen to Garry that her beau asks her if she’s in love with Allen (she demurs). But when Allen drops by the Cannon cottage, Lisa gloms onto the man to such an extent that Sally is shoved to the sidelines, and even Thorne loses his appeal; she laughs to Sally that she sees Thorne only “because it annoys Dad, of course. Why else?” But the rub here is that Lisa is horrified by the sight of physically handicapped people. “That awful-looking creature!” she shrieks upon seeing one of Allen’s friends and employees, a man in a wheelchair. “I’d die if a thing like that so much as brushed against me.”
Not to worry, though, the power of love will set Lisa on her feet in the end. One day while walking among Allen’s tiny houses, she encounters a rattlesnake, and only the quick intervention of a nearby wheelchair-bound man inexplicably carrying a gun saves her life. She screams and screams and screams! and flings herself into the lap of her rescuer, who pats her hair with his artificial hands and smiles over her with his scarred face, and Lisa refuses to let go. (You might ask yourself, how does a man with no hands fire a gun? Let’s ask wise Nurse Sally: “The marvels of artificial limbs, Lisa, can never be overestimated,” she explains somberly to her equally incredulous patient.) In any event, Lisa is now a convert: When Sally asks Lisa skeptically if she thinks she can accept the deformed man’s invitation to dine with him and his wife, Lisa answers, “I’d almost kneel at his feet. Oh, Sally, what do you think I am?” I, for one, thought she was a nasty brat who didn’t care if she trampled dollhouse rosebushes and who sneered, “I don’t see how Allen can even tolerate those hideous creatures,” but perhaps it was all meant kindly.
Now we only need to cast about for someone for Sally to marry at the last minute—hey, that Dr. Garry might do! When, three pages from the end, Garry asks her if she loves him, suddenly it’s all tears and hot cheeks: “She went into his arms as naturally, as beautifully as a homecoming bird comes into its nest at sunset,” and I flung the book across the room as naturally as an outraged reader slapped with the final straw.
Peggy Gaddis seems to have tossed several of her other books—Nurse in the Shadows, Nurse in the Tropics, Big City Nurse—into a blender and poured out Luxury Nurse. Unfortunately, the result is not a tasty chocolate malt. Sally is a patronizing, righteous tyrant, somehow meant to be admirable; Lisa is cruel, small-minded and selfish, and her complete about-face in the end is entirely unbelievable. It’s hard to believe that we could find a man dumb enough to take one of them, let alone two. My favorite things about this book were its setting on Sea Island and the cover. But I readily acknowledge that unless you have actually been to the Cloister, the first pleasure will most likely be lost on you, so you can save yourself several hours by just enjoying the cover illustration and then setting this annoying amalgamation aside.
Probation Nurse
Cover illustration by Freeman Elliot
A nurse’s duty is to serve—to obey orders unquestioningly—to respect her superiors—to follow the rules at all costs. But if the cost is a human life—and she believes her superiors to be wrong—should she take it upon herself to disobey? With only three months to prove she could be a nurse, Sabra Dunning had to choose between a patient’s life and her own career. To whom did she owe allegiance? The very rules which forced her to a decision cut her off from the only man she could turn to—her fiancé, Dr. Galen Trent. Alone, Sabra made her choice …
GRADE: C-
BEST QUOTES:
“I thought you’d sworn off thinking.”
“There’s an isolating quality about a personal disaster. It sets everything off from you, so you can see what you are and what you aren’t.”
REVIEW:
Between the lame cover illustration and the title, I secretly hoped that this might turn out to be one of those seedy nurse novels, this one perhaps about a hard-boiled RN who had strayed off the virtuous path and had to do objectionable things with a slimy blackmailing doctor to keep her past hidden. Alas, no such luck. This is in fact a story about the wholesome Sabra Dunning, who has just been accepted to nursing school. Probation nurses, which I have met in many other nurse novels but never quite understood, are apparently student nurses on their first probationary months of nursing school. If they don’t pass muster in the first three months, they are kicked out.
Unfortunately for us, the first three-quarters of the book take us on a real-time crawl through Sabra’s classes. We learn how to make beds and spend a good chapter watching the young nurses practice. We fold linens, take pulses, practice our printing, shake down thermometers, fold bandages, learn how to walk quietly and how to bathe patients, and tour every single ward and closet in the enormous hospital. I bore all of this fairly patiently, right up until “they spent a few moments learning about hot-water bottles. Boiling water was never used, they learned. They were surprised to hear that even with the cover on, and with the water well below the boiling point, a patient could sustain a severe burn from a hot-water bottle.” Innocuous as this passage may seem, it was the last straw.
But fortune finally smiled upon me, as this was something of a turning point in the book, when we at long last heard the barest rustle of a plot under the hospital sheets. A frightened man on Men’s Medical keeps asking Sabra if all the women in the ward are nurses, and tells Sabra that she’s lying when she insists that they are. Miss Burke, another nurse just six months ahead of her in training, used to be a court reporter and hints sneeringly to Sabra that she knows something about the patient’s criminal past. What exactly this is, she won’t reveal, but Sabra now spends chapters gnashing her teeth in the most Jeanne Bowman–like manner about how the patient is too frightened to get well, and how she ought to speak to the nursing supervisor about it so as to get Miss Burke removed from the ward so the poor man can relax and get better again. Eventually she does speak to the nursing supervisor, but won’t reveal who the nurse with the goods on Mr. Landow is, and Miss Burke, not surprisingly, firmly resists Sabra’s urging to identify herself. The situation eventually sorts itself out when Mr. Landow jumps out the window one night, hails a cab, and dies in the back seat en route to the pier. And that is all we will ever learn about Mr. Landow; indeed, apart from his daily paranoid exchange with Sabra, we never even hear him speak.
But with this grave mark on Sabra’s record—not to mention the time she got caught in the linen closet pressuring Miss Burke when she should have been answering call lights, and the time she dropped a bedpan, and that her uniform apron got really dirty one day—Sabra knows that she’s going to get kicked out of the program when she is called to Miss MacLaren’s office the day before the probationary period ends. She also believes that the nurse’s cap now resting on Miss MacLaren’s desk had been relieved from the poor ex–night nurse who had been on duty when Mr. Landow fled the premises. But things are never that bad for virtuous nursing students, so if you will not be surprised to find out where that nurse’s cap ends up, you will be relieved that it means the book is over.
The writing itself isn’t bad, but this book is mind-numbing, uninteresting, without any story to speak of, and at 192 pages, much longer than it needed to be. I suspect Gertrude Mallette is capable of better, but this Probation Nurse should never have graduated.
I, Theresa, Registered Nurse
By Diane Frazer, ©1965Cover illustration by Harry Bennett
“You see, Greg,” she said soberly, “nobody really knows when my birthday is.” He turned around and looked into her face. “What is this, a gag? Surely your mother knows. She was there after all.” She sat up straight. “Nobody knows when I was born. I’m not really the daughter of Stewart and Alicia Winslow; they adopted me when I was a little girl. It’s rather like a Victorian novel. But it’s fact, no fiction.” “But who … but they must know who …” “No, I was found, it seems, asleep and almost frozen to death in some woods in France, near the Swiss border. The Winslows took me from a home for such war orphans in France. All they know is that I was about four when I came up to the French peasants who discovered me and said, Je suis Thérèse …”
GRADE: B
BEST QUOTES:
“She was a nurse but she was also a girl. And being a girl she had, more or less naturally, asked for and received all pertinent information about the male members of the staff of Goodswill Hospital.”
“We don’t look very tempting in those uniforms, do we?”
REVIEW:
With a name like Theresa Winslow, you can probably already guess that our heroine comes from the proper side of Central Park—Park Avenue, in fact. She became a nurse “not out of need for earning a living,” but I’m sorry to tell you we never really learn what inspires Tessa to be the superb nurse that she is. She’s dating Greg Halsey “—that was the Halseys—” who is a Southampton neighbor of hers, but she finds him frivolous. Rather, she has the hots for Dr. Thomas Blair, who, for some strange reason, treats her with “a marked reserve” though he jokes around with the other nurses. Hmmmm.
One of her patients, as we enter the book, is Franz Grauer, a withdrawn, elderly Hungarian man with no visitors, chronic stomach pain, and a number tattooed on his arm. She is strangely intrigued by him, and visits him in her off-duty hours. He mentions that his daughter Susanna (and I must mention my delight at finding a character with my name; it doesn’t happen often!) died at the age of five in Europe during the war. She then tells him her own story: She was found in France, wandering in the woods alone, when she was about four. All she could tell of her identity was, “Je suis Thérèse,” though she also spoke a smattering of both German and Spanish. She was adopted by the Winslows after the war but has always wondered about her origins.
(She’s told Greg this story, and his reaction, after appraising her “fair and milky skin,” her hazel eyes and reddish gold hair, is that she “had just the coloring and texture once would expect in a child of pure English-Scotch-Irish background. […] It was simply not possible that she could have come from some middle-European background where, as everyone knew, all kinds of influences tend to mar the pure beauty which—Greg Halsey thought sincerely, could only be found in Anglo-Saxons. There was not the slightest hint of anything else.” This is a turning point in their relationship; she tells him he is ridiculous and stops seeing him.)
She is fascinated by Mr. Grauer: “From the very first minute that she had seen Mr. Grauer, she had the strange sensation of having seen him before. The odd feeling that he was no stranger to her but someone she had known, someone who had been very close to her. Someone she mustn’t lose again.” But her interest develops into an obsession. She loses her head and asks Tom Blair, on their first date, to keep Mr. Grauer in the hospital even though all tests on him have come back negative; Tom feels that the problem is either psychosomatic or that Mr. Grauer is a malingerer. He responds by chewing her out, reminding her of the shortage of beds for truly sick patients, and adds, “I see your kind every day, Junior Leaguers coyly doing volunteer hospital work and feeling just marvelous about it. Well, I don’t happen to think that a hospital should be a playground for spoiled and satiated society girls.” Ouch!
Undeterred, however, her lapse in moral judgment continues, and she is caught in Mr. Larsen’s office attempting to obtain Mr. Grauer’s wallet—all patients’ valuables are kept in a locked cabinet there—where he keeps a photograph of his daughter, which he has refused to allow her to see. She’s so far gone that she is “jolted” that Tom has not asked her out again after their initial date, apparently not recalling how disastrous it was or his disgust with her deteriorating personal and work ethic(s).
After Mr. Grauer has left the hospital without saying goodbye, she tracks him down at a shabby West Side address. She presses him to reveal his own history, and he tells her that he and his wife had fled Hungary with their daughter for occupied France—spoken only French to Susanna to help conceal their suspicious origins, and called her Thérèse as an alias—and that as they attempted to cross into Switzerland they were found by Nazis, though Susanna/Thérèse was able to hide and thus avoided capture. Our heroine is overjoyed, sweeping up her new father and depositing him at a better (East 63rdStreet) apartment and learning to cook Hungarian entrees for him. They invite Tom to dinner and he is again warming to Tessa, though he is concerned about a future with her. “She had everything—position, family, money. How could you take care of a girl like that? What could you give her, in the early, lean years of doctoring?”
Now comes the philosophical debate over who owns Tessa. The characters’ attitudes suggest that she is a piece of property in a battle between the Winslows and her birth parents. Mr. Grauer asks her what she would do if she were to find her birth parents, and she says, “I would go to them. Go where I belonged.” He answers, “And give up all you have?” as if, somehow, her two sets of parents are an either-or choice. Mr. Winslow fears “that there might be anyone who had a right to Tessa—a stronger right than he and his wife.” The Winslows “have acquired a right” to Tessa by adopting her, but “a [birth] father’s right is stronger.”
If her parents have a right to own Tessa, her future husband, once found, apparently not only supersedes but also obliterates all prior comers. “I just found her and now soon someone will come and take her away again,” says Mr. Grauer, referring to this husband. Tessa’s mother, concerned that birth parents could take her place, is hoping for a marriage between Greg and Tessa, seeing this “as a final break between Tessa and her past.” Tom tells Mr. Grauer that “someone would claim Tessa one of these days. In that case she would be with neither you nor the Winslows.”
To protect his so-called rights, Mr. Grauer is thinking about going back to Hungary and taking Tessa with him. When Tom disagrees with this plan, Mr. Grauer asks, “Do you not think I have a right to ask my daughter to come with me? Do you not think I have a right to some happiness after all I went through?” Curiously, Tessa’s rights, and her opinion on the matter, are not considered for one minute. His plan to move overseas with Tessa is his decision; Tessa has no say in the matter, and it is simply assumed that she must go with him.
Suspicious that Mr. Grauer is not really Tessa’s birth father, Tom—who is interested in making his own bid for Tessa—asks a friend to look into Mr. Grauer’s past, saying that there is a “legacy” at stake, “and I want to make sure he’s entitled to it.” When the results from this investigation are in, he goes to see Mr. Grauer, who circumvents what he can see is coming by asking if Tom has come to ask for Tessa’s hand in marriage. Tom protests that “I haven’t said a single romantic thing to Tessa.” Again, what does Tessa’s opinion matter? “When I was young, the girl was the last to know,” Mr. Grauer answers. “The most important thing was to ask the father.” So Tom immediately asks for Tessa. Mr. Grauer, interestingly, refuses—then says that he’s not Tessa’s father, and he knows that Tom is aware of this, but how did Tom find out? “She is an altogether different racial type,” he answers—bringing us back to poor jilted Greg’s response.
But there are other bits of evidence, and Mr. Grauer admits all. Tom realizes that if he tells Tessa the truth about Mr. Grauer, she will most likely reject him—so he will lose Tessa either way. But then Mr. Grauer offers his olive branch: If Tessa decides to marry Tom, Mr. Grauer does not have to be dethroned as the birth father. “One loses a daughter, but one gains a son. Shall we drink to that, Dr. Blair?” It’s a done deal, and Tessa is bought and sold over glasses of Hungarian wine.
But then the Winslows return from Europe, and Dad has a final trick up his sleeve. While abroad, he’d done some research of his own and found an elderly curate in France who remembered the day Tessa and her birth parents came to town. The parents were shot trying to escape, he’d discovered, but the little girl, who had told the curate, “Je m’appelle Thérèse,” had not been found. But all interested parties win in the end: The last chapter has Tessa going to visit the graveyard in Mornex, southeast of Geneva, with her new husband (guess who that is?). Despite getting married, she hasn’t written off Mr. Grauer, though he’s found a Hungarian lady friend and “maybe her job was about done” with him.
The book has a very pretty ending, and it certainly raises a lot of interesting topics: identity, what it means to be a parent, relationships and the rights that come with them. The book doesn’t actually resolve the issues about who owns Tessa, unless we award her to her husband, so all that philosophical wrangling for her seems like a waste of time. The writing in the book is not particularly special, but the author has built a unique storyline, which I really appreciate after 178 VNRNs that seem to share the same three or five plots, and if you like to ponder the issues, this book is worth reading.
Judy George, Student Nurse
By Patti Stone, ©1966Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti
For Judy George, nursing is full of challenge and drama. When an accident case is brought into emergency, Judy is strangely attracted to the gaunt, red-haired victim known only as Joe Smith. Though his recovery is quick despite a persistent loss of feeling in one thumb, Joe is depressed. To help him overcome his handicap, Judy convinces him that the best therapy is to work at the hospital. He surprises everyone with his care and concern for crippled children. Judy wonders just what he did before the accident, but Joe mysteriously guards his past. Soon Judy realizes that, despite the fact he is still a stranger to her, she is in love with him. But how can she plan the future with a man who refuses to discuss his past?
GRADE: C
BEST QUOTES:
“I bet you’re a first-year intern. They’re the only ones I know who go around bragging they’re doctors.”
“Our theme song is the ambulance siren.”
“It’s surprising how much courage a touch of lipstick can give a woman.”
“His chart shows he’s been having the delirium tremens for 24 hours.”
“Yes,” Joe said soberly.
“It wasn’t easy to stop nursing, Judy. But my husband—and now my son—work long hours under tension. They want to put their problems aside in their home. I suppose most nurses daydream of marrying a doctor and working by his side. Well, that wasn’t the kind of wife my husband wanted. But, by creating a calm, pleasant atmosphere, I feel I am helping him in my own way.”
“You’ve studied so much in the past few weeks that pretty soon you’ll be up in surgery as a patient being operated on for strabismus—which, in case you’ve forgotten, is crossed eyes.”
REVIEW:
Judy George is yet another nurse-orphan, raised by yet another country GP grandfather, Grandpa Noah, along with her sister and three younger brothers. Anne is now working as a nurse back in Wheatville, married and expecting a baby of her own, while still raising their brothers. Judy is finishing her final year of training at Bonifacio General in Kansas City, and as the book opens she is trapped in the service elevator with Dr. Harry Jennison, an up-and-coming OB/GYN whose father is chief of staff at the hospital. They immediately start dating, but Harry seems more into it than Judy. She’s bound to go back to Wheatville after she graduates, and Harry, she knows, is just not meant for a small-town practice. “Harry considered Wheatville just a wide place in the road,” so that cools Judy’s ardor somewhat. “She was committed to going home as soon as she finished training. She didn’t dare fall in love.” Famous last words.
Then this man is brought into the ED when Judy is working there. His arm has been damaged in a car accident, and he has no identification on him. When he wakes up, he gives his name as Joe Smith—gee, I wonder if that’s an alias?—and is a charity patient on the ward, though his clothes and car were expensive, and he is clearly well-educated. He tells everyone that he has no friends or family, and he is grumpy as all get out because his right hand is partially paralyzed from the accident. Judy, who is now working on the men’s medical ward, takes him on as a personal project. Why is he so bad-tempered? Then a briefcase is brought in, and Judy takes a peek and finds out it contains sketches, and so concludes “Joe Smith” was an artist. She decides that what Joe really needs is a job, so she orchestrates a position as an orderly for him when he recovers. When she sees him pushing a small boy in a wheelchair, “elation swept through her. She had no idea why, but she had never in her entire life felt so happy.” Well, I don’t know about you, readers, but I can take a guess why. Can you?
He’s still irritable as ever—when Judy exclaims that she’s surprised to see him working, he answers, “I have a funny habit. I like to eat,”—but Judy persists in her friendly way and over time he warms up. Eventually he even asks her out. But he’s still a very angry young man, shouting at Judy and breaking her pencil when she’s all excited that he was able, with his left arm, to draw the bones of the arm when he’s helping her study for her exams. “They teach anatomy in art schools, too, you know,” he growls at her. She grovels for his forgiveness, and he’s kind enough to give it. He’s a swell guy, is Joe Smith.
Then he becomes obsessed with a young boy whose hand was scarred by burns and is now a useless claw. The boy has become virtually catatonic, and Joe is convinced that if the hand is repaired, the boy will get better. He persuades Judy to persuade Harry to persuade his father to persuade his friend Dr. Carter, who specializes in children’s plastic surgery, to take the case. Joe watches the surgery, which is a huge success, of course, but afterward he’s pale and sweating, and he refuses to talk to Judy, “shoved her violently aside,” and runs from the OR. “Before her eyes she had seen a man go to pieces, and she didn’t know why.” Two pages later, Joe has resigned his position and gone AWOL.
Not to worry, there’s nothing like a natural disaster to bring two star-crossed lovers together. Judy is working in the decrepit geriatric wing when the tornado hits and destroys the building. She, in typical VNRN fashion, is the last one out, having gone in to check for any more patients, and Joe shows up the day she is discharged. He drives her home—but guess what, her sister is in labor and not doing well, and the Green River is over the road in a couple of places and one of the bridges isn’t in very good condition, and the phone lines are down so they can’t call a doctor. “She needs a doctor now,” Judy declares, when she and Joe finally arrive and find Anne struggling. Now, prepare yourself for this shocker! “There’s me,” Joe says quietly, and he’s not joking! He’s a plastic surgeon from the very top residency program in the nation, with nine years’ experience! I was pleased that in the end, he doesn’t remember anything about the dosages of medications for birthin’ babies, which would have been a stretch for a plastic surgeon. Mostly he just assists Anne with the labor and then delivers the baby with forceps, with nothing but a tiny bruise on her head to show for it. And he’s so excited by his success that he wants to become a GP in Wheatville! Really? Wheatville? asks Judy the dunce. “This is the only town you’d consider living in,” he answers, and follows that up with his marriage proposal. She accepts, and then he tells her that his name isn’t Joe Smith at all! It’s Jason Sibley!!! Who knew?
This book seemed a bit familiar, as the GP grandfather and the disaster at the end of the book are straight out of Patti Stone’s Big Town Nurse, as is the fact that Patti introduces us to about every single person in the hospital—in this book, we meet 57 medical professionals as well as half again as many patients. And it does bother me when the heroine nurse can’t see what’s been clearly obvious to the reader since, oh, page 18. At 160 pages, this book is too long to contain what little it does, and if it’s not overtly irritating, it doesn’t have a whole lot to recommend it, either, apart from the excellent Lou Marchetti cover.
City Hospital Nurse
By Jeanne Bowman(pseud. Peggy O’More Blocklinger), ©1967
Because of her love for the grandparents who had given her a home after her parents had died, Geraldine Greene had always wanted to specialize in geriatrics. But she soon learned that elderly patients were reluctant to put their trust in a too young and too pretty nurse. So Geri decided to be what her patients wanted her to be—plain, old-looking and, therefore, confidence-inspiring. She didn’t stop to think that while such a masquerade might further her nursing career, it could hamper her personal life—not until Jilson Watts III was wheeled into the emergency operating room at City Center Hospital. Jil, who looked at the real Geri and was “an angel … beautiful … worth dying for.” But the next time he saw her—curly hair sleeked back, laughing eyes veiled, dimpled smile sobered—he did not recognize her …
GRADE: C
BEST QUOTES:
“Even as she, Geri, had given her all to geriatrics, so was Natalie preparing for that great day when she would be a wife and hostess to top brass executives of companies patronizing her husband’s agency.”
“Carefully she recalled a psychiatrist’s findings. It took a housewife four weeks, after a move, to handle kitchen cupboards without conscious thought.”
“Geri had had an injury which left a definite dent in her heart.”
“She had quite a choice to make. The career she had chosen, with its change of personality, or the gay life she had led, with constant dates with delightful men?”
“Oh, for the day when phones came equipped with tiny TV panels so one could peep and identify the caller before submitting to unnecessary disturbers.”
REVIEW:
I may have said this before, but it takes a certain amount of steely nerve for me to pick up a Jeanne Bowman novel. This is, after all, the author who gave us the dreadful Door to Door Nurse and the spectacularly loony Conflict for Nurse Elsa, which I think must have been written under the influence of powerful psychotropics. But I have to say that I did stop several times through the first half of City Hospital Nurse and declare with some surprise, “This isn’t so terrible!” So take that for what it’s worth, which admittedly isn’t much.
Geri is a brand-new nurse on her first assignment in geriatrics, her chosen field. She’s been assigned to special a recovering elderly lady—but right on the first page, her career comes crashing down. The patient takes one look at young, pretty Geri, with her curling short hair, and snorts, “Had I wanted an escapee from kindergarten, I would not have asked for a nurse!” So she’s sent back to the hospital to work in the emergency department when a wealthy young lad, Jilson Watts III, is wheeled in after a car accident. The pair take one look at each other and fall deeply in love, and then he passes out and is trucked off to surgery. She convinces herself that he’s a wealthy gadabout, and although she realizes that “Geri Greene had had a concussion of the heart,” she does her best to put it behind her.
At home, she decides to try to disguise herself as an older, uglier woman so as to impress her elderly patients. She sleeks her hair back and practices frowning in the mirror, and now she’s ready for duty. Her disguise is so complete that “when a traffic officer snarled at her instead of giving her a gay salute and a ‘watch it, kitten,’ she knew she had achieved geriatric status.” And so, when she passes Jilson Watts in the halls the next day—he’s touring the hospital in search of the “angel” he saw in the ED last night—he takes one look at her and shudders. She runs off, furious—but not to worry, faithful VNRN readers, she soon drops her disguise with him by fluffing up her hair and dimpling at him, and now they’re dating, and nauseatingly so; Geri “reached a deeper truth. For her now, no material dwelling, no matter what size, shape or location, could be home. Not without Jilson Watts being a part of it.” And on his end, he tells her that when he opend his eyes in the ED, “it was as though I’d awakened into a world where I was complete. You might say I felt, when I looked at you, that I’d come home.” Bleah.
This is just halfway through—the point at which I stopped telling myself that the book wasn’t so bad—and the rest of it consists of Geri’s attempt to be nominated for sainthood in record time by healing everyone in sight. Because, of course, Geri possesses that witch-like ability of Bowman's heroines, an ability to heal everyone with a three-minute chat, as it turns out that the diseases that everyone in the hospital is suffering from really stem from emotional troubles. “I’d known a patient who was worried over cold cash and broke out in hot spots. We had a little chat,” she says, summing up her awesone healing powers very modestly.
And Geri is just getting warmed up: She cures a woman’s insomnia by getting the patient to recall that she’d been spanked as a child for sleeping in church. She divines that the man who repeatedly breaks bones from falling out of bed is having nightmares about the time he fell into a well as a child. And another patient is freaking out, convinced he is going to die because he has been confined to room 931. Geri instantly divines the man’s concerns—nine plus three plus one is thirteen!!! It turns out that Geri’s nursing class made a study of numerology, and she’s going to bring in some “proof” tomorrow, although the clincher is the fact that the patient himself is healing from surgery “better than a young whippersnapper.” Then she reminds the man that 13 is a baker’s dozen, which means a free cookie or bun, and now the man is all smiles. And the list goes on and on from there, I’m sorry to say.
This book has, curiously, taken up the Medicare banner with the intense fervor of Shakespeare’s Henry V on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt. Most of her elderly patients’ anxieties she can smooth away with a brochure from the SSI explaining that their stays are paid for by the program, which debuted in July 1966, the year before this novel was published. “On one case I found a woman suffering acutely because she didn’t know how she could meet surgery, doctor and hospital bills without going back to a physical drudgery which would pop her back into the hospital,” Geri relates. “I checked on her Medicare benefits, was able to relieve her misery, which manifested itself in physical tension; and her recovery, like her bill, was short-ended.” Someone ought to slip this book to Mitt Romney.
City Hospital Nurseis not without intentional humor and occasional bursts of interesting writing, such as when Geri tells a patient, “I just lost my temper, and while I’ve found it again, it hasn’t shaken down to where it fits.” But it also has the power to incite PTSD, with its use of a single word—atmosphere, for example, brought me screaming in terror back to Nurse Elsa’s Conflict, and even the admittedly minor infatuation with Geri’s hair forced me to recall Bowman’s Nurse Betrayed. I must admit, though, that the first half of this book is actually enjoyable, until Geri and her beau start mooning at each other and Ms. Bowman has nothing else to do but shovel heavily from her bag of usual tricks. Even so, there’s just not enough here, apart from the guilty pleasure we can derive from reading a stupid book, to make picking up City Hospital Nurse worthwhile.
Copyright © C-buk2016
